Habayta (Homeward)

On Tuesday night (January 1st) we will leave Jerusalem around 9:00 pm with all our stuff and travel to Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv for a 1:00 am flight. I am feeling excited about going home, so much that I don’t mind the three planes we will have to take to get back to O’Hare.

When we booked these tickets, the route was Tel Aviv to Paris, then Paris to Chicago. However, a few months ago Air France unceremoniously emailed that we would now be stopping in Detroit. I’m sure the Motor City is lovely in January, but adding a stop like this while traveling with kids can be deflating.

We have a ten hour layover in Paris and have arranged for a whirlwind tour of the sights. A driver picks us up at the airport and takes us from tourist attraction to tourist attraction, before returning us to the airport. The girls and I have never been to Paris and Adena has not been there since 1992. Hopefully we can stay awake long enough to enjoy it.

We should land in Chicago around 9:00 pm on Wednesday and will be staying at a hotel on-site. In the morning, I will take an Uber to pick up the minivan we reserved at Alamo. We will pack our stuff one last time and drive to Champaign. We’ll have to try and remember the code for the security system, and hopefully the spare key is still on the garage.

Thursday promises to be busy. In addition to driving from O’Hare, we need to visit Verizon and AT&T to re-establish cell phone service and get new American phone numbers. We also need to clean seven months of dust off everything and buy groceries.

On Friday, we visit Aviva’s new daycare classroom (same place, different building) and the campus parking department to restart our parking permits. Millie goes back to school on Tuesday, but there is no room in the afterschool program she had been doing. Adena and I will check out a similar one at Chesterbrook over the lunch hour next Tuesday.

It has been a productive and enjoyable sabbatical for me and Adena and the girls have had a wonderful time. I am finding it more difficult to leave than I expected, but I am also excited to get back to our house and our lives in Champaign-Urbana.